The conventional wisdom is that politicians' rent seeking motives increase public debt and deficit. This is because myopic politicians face political risk and prefer to extract political rents as early as possible. An implication of this argument is that governments will under-save during a...

"Starve the Beast" is a theory held by many Republicans, which holds that tax cuts automatically bring about spending cuts and thus prevent an increase in the budget deficit. This paper explains how this theory came to be developed and its political and economic consequences

This paper examines the fiscal challenges that the new EU member states in Central and Eastern Europe (NEW-8) are facing that arise from both EU membership and from developments that are essentially independent of EU membership. While the direct fiscal strains caused by EU membership may appear...

Die neue Bundesregierung wird zur Finanzierung neuer Ausgabenschwerpunkte nur bedingt auf eine Kreditfinanzierung ausweichen können, da nach aktuellem Stand ab 2023 wieder die Schuldenbremse greifen wird. Auch die Möglichkeit, die Mehrausgaben durch Steuererhöhungen zu decken, kann als...

While fiscal forecasting and monitoring has its roots in the accountability of governments for the use of public funds in democracies, the Stability and Growth Pact has significantly increased interest in budgetary forecasts in Europe, where they play a key role in the EU multilateral budgetary...

Short-term fiscal indicators based on public accounts data are often used by European policy makers. They represent one of the main sources of publicly available intra-annual fiscal information. Nevertheless, these indicators have received limited attention from the academic literature analysing...

Public discussion of federal fiscal policy typically focuses on several familiar metrics of performance, including the total deficit, the level of public debt and percentage of federal spending committed to mandatory spending and net interest payments. While useful, these measures are based on...

This paper examines the characteristics and determinants of the deviations between the initial and final figures of the Spanish public budget from 1985 to 2006. Our goal is to evaluate the extent to which initial budgeted figures adhered ex-post to actual fiscal figures, by trying to unveil...

This paper examines the question of whether the U.S. State Department’s budget should be cut, and if so, by how much. If its budget increased by the same percentage as the increase in GDP since 2000, it would be 43.3 percent smaller than it was in 2016

For decades, a central element of the Republican Party brand has been to call for fiscal responsibility through balanced budgets. We ask if the Republican Party has ever lived up to these ideological principles. Medicare Part D and paying for the recent Afghanistan and Iraq wars are striking...